The Hedgehog Review: Vol. 20 No. 2 (Summer 2018)

Do Women Exist?

Mary Townsend

The Hedgehog Review: Summer 2018

In her imperfect masterpiece The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir observes, “If I want to define myself, I first have to say, ‘I am a woman’; all other assertions will arise from this basic truth.”1 Such immediate epistemic certainty is admirable, maybe even enviable. Americans usually approach it only on occasions when the correct answer to “What do you do?” is inevitably a statement involving the godlike “I am.” “I am an electrician, I am a lawyer, I am fortunate to be an x at y.”

But for an American woman, should she pause to consider it, the matter stands differently than it does for Beauvoir. “I am a woman” is not the first thing that comes to mind when such a human accidentally finds herself faced with the problem of just what sort of thing she is, anyway. “Woman” is far too troubled a category to be immediate for us. Isn’t it a graceful fiction, subject to the whims of a given culture? It seems inelegant, beside the point; when asserted as a rejoinder or a slogan, it runs the risk of sounding aggressively sentimental, even absurd.

Beauvoir, herself being safely French, is on to us. “The defiant position that American women occupy,” she writes, when faced with such a question, “proves that they are haunted by the feelings of their own femininity.”2 Encountering this statement as one such American woman, one suddenly finds oneself full of certainty after all. Immediate defiance and a strong negative seem but reasonable and just: “I am definitely not haunted by being a woman!” In much the same way, the nineteenth-century Americans whom Alexis de Tocqueville interrogated about the state of their democracy were immediately moved to defensive anger when he delicately attempted to offer critiques of their way of life. Americans will accept any criticism of themselves, Tocqueville observes, however scathing, as long as it does not come from a foreigner —and French critique perhaps feels particularly uncalled for.3

Whether or not American women are at a peculiar disadvantage here, we do now find ourselves in a bit of an existential predicament with regard to the being-ness of being a woman. If “I am a woman” is not a particularly revelatory way to declare what one is, what becomes of a group of women when they pronounce the even more difficult “we” as in, perilously, “We women have decided this” or “We women have decided to march on Washington”? This innocent first-person plural is important for several reasons, the most pressing of which is political: Under what circumstances should we allow ourselves to act together for a common goal, despite the variety of our differences? When the “I” is in doubt, its corollary “We are” is in trouble.

Within any other group, Beauvoir argues, common cause, common action, and common feeling are more imaginable than they are among women as a body. We live “dispersed among men,” tied by interest to nearly every other thing than merely being a woman, which fact seems trivial compared to ties of social group or class, race, religion, or nationality, beauty, skill, or age. Women do not proclaim themselves a “we,” says Beauvoir, except in the artificial circumstances of academic prose (touché). “In Lysistrata,” she notes, “Aristophanes lightheartedly imagined a group of women who, uniting together for the social good, tried to take advantage of men’s need of them”—so far, so good. She concludes by saying this, however: “But [the Lysistrata] is only a comedy.”4 The joke is always on us: Our revolution is undercut before it’s begun.

Mary Townsend is a visiting assistant professor at Loyola University, New Orleans. Her most recent book is The Woman Question in Plato’s Republic.

Reprinted from The Hedgehog Review 20.2 (Summer 2018). This essay may not be resold, reprinted, or redistributed for compensation of any kind without prior written permission. Please contact The Hedgehog Review for further details.

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Published three times a year by the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture, The Hedgehog Review offers critical reflections on contemporary culture—how we shape it, and how it shapes us.